It could have been Greenspan, but Easy Al chose a different path. Now, the dominoes have been set into motion and can’t be stopped. I heard it expressed this way…”You can’t cheat someone who doesn’t trust you.” The banks don’t trust each other now because they know how much toxic debt they themselves are carrying on (and off) their own books and can only guess at how much their competitors are carrying…so they won’t lend to each other without a mark to market mass purge of the stinking crap, rendering many banks insolvent. That would be the Warren Buffett “we won’t know who’s been swimming naked ’till the tide goes out” moment. It would also be a free market capitalist correction. Politically, that would be untenable, so what you are getting instead is smoke and mirrors along with bald-faced lies. Can this administration buy enough time to pass it on to the next one?

1.8M is a lot of money, when many posters talk about astromnomical 2006 values for their Irvine apartments and seem shocked that their apartment may not be worth that sum after the current correction, it’s good to pause and reflect that yes 1.8M is a lot of money and should buy real mansion and something strange and unprecidented did occur at the start of the 21st century.

Indeed, 1.8 million is a lot of money when you actually have to pay it back rather than pass the bag on to the next guy.

We will also see the definition of “equity” return to its true meaning being the amount of principal paid off buy the owner rather than its commonly mis-used meaning which analogizes it with “capital gains”.

We just got word from our landlord that he will be selling the house and that we will have to move. Besides the waste of a weekend and a little back-breaking labor, their is nothing tragic, difficult, shameful, etc about the process. We just find another place and send out change of address cards.